This is why it would have been such a disaster if the HCR died. Via Ezra Klein:
This is an interesting tidbit from Noam Scheiber:
On Wednesday, Obama told Dodd and his House counterpart, Barney Frank, that he could more or less live with either version, according to an official knowledgeable about the meeting. (Though he stressed that he’d like to combine the toughest elements of both, as with an exemption from derivatives regulation for non-financial companies, which is stricter in Dodd’s bill.) Mostly, he just encouraged them to press ahead, emphasizing the win-win dynamic at work. If Republicans dig in, the president argued, that’s a fight he’d welcome. (Administration officials have seen polling suggesting that the public will assume Republicans are carrying Wall Street’s water, regardless of their arguments.) And if Republicans want to join in the effort to rein in Wall Street — well, no one at the White House would turn down a big, bipartisan victory.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/the_win-win_politics_of_health.html Republicans either shoot themselves in the foot or get on board a bipartisan bill, and the teabaggers will probably hate them for working with Obama.